FHES 2011
International Symposium on
Foundations of Health Information Engineering and Systems
(http://www.iist.unu.edu/ICTAC/FHIES2011/)
27-29 August 2011 Mabalingwe Nature Reserve, South Africa
(Colocated with ICTAC 2011)


Information and communication technology plays an increasingly enabling role in addressing
the global challenges of healthcare, in both the developed and the developing world, that are
the concern of the United Nations, its Peoples and Members States. The use of software in
medical devices is already raising issues in relation to safety and efficacy for manufacturers and
regulators. Health information systems raise issues of both privacy and confidentiality, on the one
hand, and, increasingly, patient safety on the other. Hospital and other information systems raise
important issues of efficacy and interoperability. However, to capitalize on the potential of this
technology in reshaping healthcare
demands focused research on sound and safe development techniques from software engineering,
electronic engineering, computing science, information science, mathematics, and industrial engineering.

Aims
=====
The purpose of the new symposium series on Foundations of Software Engineering Health Informatics (FHIES)
is to promote a nascent research area that aims to develop and apply theories and techniques in computing
science and software engineering to modelling, building and certifying software based systems in the application
domain of healthcare. Many of these systems are already regulated in many jurisdictions and many more of them
will become regulated in the future.

Research on theories, techniques and tools of software modelling, verification and validation has been an important
area of computer science and software engineering, known as Formal Methods. This research addresses the
challenging problem of design and certification of safety or mission critical software systems through abstraction
and decomposition techniques based on the use of mathematical modelling theories and sound engineering methods.
Formal methods have primarily addressed the correctness of systems used in the industrial, financial, and defence
applications. However, they have recently found application in modelling and analysis of complex systems that
involve interacting behaviour of many kinds of objects and agents, including software systems, physical objects and
humans. The models of these systems have both discrete and continuous behaviour, and both qualitative and
quantitative (e.g., spatial timing and probabilistic) properties. It is believed that these methods can be used for
modelling problems of health informatics, which presents the challenge of scalability.

Software plays a critical role in sustainable health care, both as part of the solution and as part of the problem.
Software intensive information systems are needed to support the collection and processing of vast amounts of
data via different devices, and allow policy makers to access and share these data, and to support their decision
making and validation. Software systems can be developed for managing, controlling and monitoring policies,
processes and workflows in medical systems. Software systems can be developed to help create the
sophisticated medical devices that are simply impossible to build without the software. On the other hand,
the application of software raises challenging issues in safety, security and privacy, and increases the
complexity of healthcare workflows and the need for new business policies.

Paper Submissions
==============

We solicit high quality submissions reporting on

1. original research contributions (18 pages maximum in LNCS format)
2. application experience, case studies and software prototypes (18 pages maximum in LNCS format)
3. surveys, comparisons, and state-of-the-art reports (18 pages maximum in LNCS format)
4. position papers that define research projects with identified challenges and milestones (10 pages maximum in LNCS format)
5. proposals for panel discussions, with at least three named panellists, about a topical question (5 pages maximum in LNCS format).

All submissions will be judged on the basis of originality, contribution to the field, technical and presentation quality, and
relevance to the conference. Submissions should be in English, prepared in the LNCS format (see
here for details). Submission constitutes a commitment to attend and present a paper, if accepted.

All accepted papers will be included in the pre-event proceedings of the symposium and considered for EXCEPT FOR the proposals for panel discussions inclusion in a special issue of the Springer Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering (ISSE), following revision and re-review.


Organization
=========

General Chairs

* Peter Haddawy, UNU-IIST, Macao
* Tom Maibaum, McMaster University, Canada


Programme Chairs

* Zhiming Liu, UNU-IIST, Macao
* Alan Wassyng, McMaster University, Canada


Organising Chair

* Hao Wang, UNU-IIST, Macao


Program Committee

* Syed Mohamed Aljunid, UNU-IIGH
* Sebastian Fischmeister, University of Waterloo, Canada
* Peter Haddawy, UNU-IIST, Macao
* Jozef Hooman, Embedded Systems Institute and Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
* Michaela Huhn, TU Clausthal, Germany
* Mark Lawford, McMaster University, Canada
* Insup Lee, University of Pennsylvania, USA
* Martin Leucker, TU Munich, Germany
* Wendy MacCaull, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada
* Tom Maibaum, McMaster University, Canada
* Dominique Mery, LORIA and Universite Henri Poincare Nancy 1, France
* Jun Pang, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
* David Robertson, University of Edinburgh, UK
* Lutz Schröder, DFKI Bremen and University of Bremen, Germany
* Jens H. Weber, University of Victoria, Canada
* Liang Xiao, Hubei University of Technology, P.R.China